The Democratic Party controlled the House of Representatives from 1954 to 1995. When Newt took the House in 1994 (largely due to a demoralized democratic base linked with failed health care reform) it was seen as a surprise, not an inevitable development. The Republicans took the Senate in 1980, but lost it in 1986. There was talk of Republicans having a permanent lock on the Presidency though, with Jimmy Carter being seen as an aberration due to Watergate.
With respect, you need to change the premise and rethink your position. No worries though: I don’t know anybody who has figured this stuff out (least of all myself) and I like reading your thoughts on the subject.
ETA: GWBush and Rove made plans to capture a block of the Hispanic vote. They had a plausible strategy IMHO. Specifically: don’t overtly piss them off.
Exapno Mapcase: Heh. What I was trying to express is that I think the Republicans have woken up to the fact that they have an incentive to act like they are operating in a Parliamentary democracy, though in fact the checks and balances system assumes a deliberative approach.
The OP:
As I said on the previous page, Obama signed an executive order banning torture, which Romney and the neocon dead-enders want to repeal.
More generally, libertarian non-interventionalists need to join forces with other peaceniks and form a think tank that can plot out a foreign policy consistent with military spending at a 2% of GDP level. AFAIK, that hasn’t been done: the Carnegie endowment for example is far less ambitious than that (again AFAIK). Otherwise you ultimately won’t be taken seriously. Obama is an incrementalist: if you want big leaps, you have to prepare the intellectual groundwork.
We’re blowing up plenty of innocents. Obama is obviously like most Americans; he doesn’t look at foreigners as human, so has no moral qualms about casually killing them.
> The Democratic Party controlled the House of Representatives from 1954 to
> 1995. When Newt took the House in 1994 (largely due to a demoralized
> democratic base linked with failed health care reform) it was seen as a surprise,
> not an inevitable development. The Republicans took the Senate in 1980, but
> lost it in 1986. There was talk of Republicans having a permanent lock on the
> Presidency though, with Jimmy Carter being seen as an aberration due to
> Watergate.
When I said that the Republican leaders decided during the Reagan administration that they would henceforth be the majority party, controlling the Presidency, the House, and the Senate, I didn’t mean that they thought that they controlled it at the time. They could count and see that the controlled the Presidency and the Senate but not the House. I meant that they thought they they would soon pick up the House in some reasonably close year. From then on, every time they picked up control of one of those three institutions, they thought that this was the beginning of their inevitable reign. Now, of course, in reality the Presidency, the House, and the Senate have simply swung back and forth between the two parties since 1980.
Over the very long term, there are demographic changes and cultural changes happening in the U.S. that will frustrate any chance that the Republicans could continue to win any of those three institutions in that very long term. They could moderate their positions, but that would probably lose them the enthusiasm of their hardcore base. Perhaps at some point in the future they will moderate their positions, convince their hardcore base that this moderation is necessary, and move back toward the center. At the moment though, they continue to play to that hardcore base. They continue to talk as though culturally and demographically the U.S. was still like it was in the 1950’s. They continue to talk as if their crazy budget made some sense. This energizes their base. That base isn’t a majority of the country at all, but it’s a significant part of it. That’s what I mean be saying that Romney isn’t that far from the middle. He’s actually slightly more liberal than that hardcore base. You and I may consider that hardcore base to be non-reality-based, but the fact is that it exists.
Because Obama is less evil than Romney. Either they have poor judgment, or they are deliberately voting to increase evil in the world; either way, they should be called on it.
Well I am a progressive, I agree, Barack Obama is a terrorist president. He will not close Gitmo. He will not end the drone strikes. He will not restore habeas corpus. He authorizes the assassination of US citizens.
That said, Obama DID put an end to official US support of torture. Whereas Mitt Romney’s team has written a memo calling for the reinstitution of torture, and Romney himself has refused to condemn torture. Romney WILL authorize torture if elected, and his foreign policy staff as frothing at the mouth for a shot at war with Iran.
And the reason why it is difficult is that people think that said anecdotes are lies. Thus telling someone you didn’t believe their anecdote is telling them you think they are a lying, which you have all ruled is equivalent to calling someone a liar.
Thus, if you don’t want to call someone a liar, you are indeed required to take someone’s word for what happened. Otherwise your only choice is to claim they were mistaken, which was not done here.
It may not feel like they are calling them a liar, but, logically, there’s no other interpretation.
Drone strikes are creepy, and killing people is bad.
But think how many more civilians per strike were killed when we used cruise missiles instead of drones. I remember the answer being a lot.
We are not going to stop blowing up terrorist targets. It’s not a realistic option, as much as I would like that nobody blew up anyone any where. Doing a more targeted strike with a drone that takes out a few dozen as opposed to a few hundred seems less bad.
Putting Mitt Romney in charge wont stop people getting blown up. Wish I knew what would. If we got a viable third party candidate I’d advocate voting for them. It is going to have to be someone moderate and charming as hell. And they would probably still use drone strikes, because so many people over here are scare and pissed off by what is happening over there that they aren’t going to support someone who is a pacifist.
I know of no evidence for this characterization. My anecdotal evidence (FWIW - not a lot) suggests the opposite. Meaning there were no unreasonable expectations at work.
Yes, while demographics isn’t quite destiny, it is ignored at one’s peril.
I guess I have to agree that Romney is in sync with the base, and maybe a little bit leaning towards the center – as are all Presidential nominees. But the divergence between policy and perception of policy is worth noting and scratching one’s head about.
Back to #1: Generally speaking, I’m wary of underestimating political professionals (or professionals of any sort). That said, it’s human nature to maintain a successful strategy even as the fundamentals trend in the opposite direction. I don’t doubt though that if the Republicans experience electoral collapse (adjusted for the economy and incumbency) that they or their successors will mend their ways. If not in 4 years, then definitely in 8. 16 years would astound me.
The OP:
It would be easy to compile a list of center-left military and national security experts whose stances are consistent with modest cuts in military spending. Check out the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Center for Defense Information, John E. Pike or the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. It’s rather harder to come up with examples of Libertarian peacenik security experts – though I would be happen to be proven wrong on this point. Similarly the ACLU, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International are among the sorts of organizations admired by liberals and vilified by modern movement conservatives such as the Heritage Foundation (who also dislike the previously cited center-left national security organizations).
I can see why a conservative who thinks that the US government shouldn’t torture people might feel left out in the cold. But I might question such conservatives’ commitment as a group.
Let me make one more point: You’re probably wondering how the Republican hardcore base can have such a non-reality-based political philosophy. It’s because they don’t talk to anyone else. Polls show that Southern white males consider themselves to be Republican rather than Democratic by 62% to 22% (with the others being independents or refusing to answer the question or whatever). If you drop the ones who have a graduate or professional degree, the ones who just recently moved from some other part of the country, the ones who live in racially mixed parts of big cities, the ones who work at jobs where they spend a lot of time with people quite different than themselves, etc., the proportion is probably more like 85% to 10% for Republicans over Democrats. The proportion is similar outside the South for certain communities. Among the Republican base, the opinions of their friends are all that’s important. They simply ignore anything in books, newspapers, television, movies, etc. that disagrees with those opinions.